Son[i]a

In our second conversation with founding director of Forensic Architecture Eyal Weizman, we explore further the nuances of their sophisticated research practice, this time focusing on the notions of time and duration from a forensic perspective in order to unfold multiple temporalities from an instant. In doing so, Weizman explains how to build a case for public truth using clouds, architecture, metadata, shadows, testimonies, and surveillance and satellite imagery. 

Peter Blasser is a designer of electronic instruments and one-of-a-kind in the world of synthesizer builders. His circuit designs catalyse philosophical concepts in the form of whimsical analog synthesizers that have been evolving since he started his company, Ciat-Lonbarde, in Baltimore more than 15 years ago. In this podcast, Peter Blasser introduces us to his environmental instruments and meditates on his view on electronics and synthesizers as a form of creativity. In this podcast, Peter Blasser introduces us to his environmental instruments and reflects on his views on electronics and synthesizers as a form of creativity. He invokes elements such as wood, sunlight, wind, touch and craft in the process.

Violeta Ospina is an artist, an educator, and a facilitator of collaborative projects that pay special attention to sound and the body. Using typical expressions and imaginaries of popular celebrations as raw materials, her work unfolds through multiform devices that seek to intensify the present. Piñatas, scale models, processions, karaoke, carnival, and cabaret all make an appearance in her practice as catalysts for violence and tenderness, which can also awaken the parodic potential that is always latent in everyday situations. Violeta is co-founder of Radio Cava-ret, a project linked to listening and theatricality, which, taking up the baton from the Futurists, calls itself a “radia”: the experimental and erotic flip side of traditional radio.

Charles Bernstein is a poet, essayist, editor, and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Together with Bruce Andrews, he edited the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which gave its name to a movement of more than a hundred poets interested in the radical exploration of writing that flourished in the late 1970s and the 1980s on both the east and west coasts of the United States. In this podcast, we hear Charles Bernstein think aloud about the performativity of poetry and the multiplicity of voice, elaborating on questions such as the sound of writing, presence and absence, orality, aurality and a/orality. Along the way, Bernstein recounts his first textual experience and acknowledges the influence of Artaud, Bob Wilson and the Living Theatre in shaping him as a poet. We also revisit the early discussions of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E constellation, their policy of exchanging poems and essays by setting up horizontal cultural mechanisms, and a collaborative effort to reread poets from past decades in order to write an alternative, non-hegemonic history of American poetry.

We talk to dancer, choreographer, and visual artist La Ribot about key moments in her childhood, the collective creation and delirium of Bocanada Danza, Festival Desviaciones, the UVI group and the subsequent financial and emotional crisis that drove her from London in the nineties, and her encounter with the performing arts boom. She talks to us from the breathing room she has gained with her new centre for dance and teaching in Switzerland. In the midst of comings and goings, we discover moments that allow us to flesh out and strip back the diva, from her childhood wish to be a gypsy and the lasting impression of a little girl’s fascination on seeing a bullfight on TV, to her found object fetishes, the camera-operator, and a (perhaps dreamt) falling out with Joan Brossa.

Lucía Egaña is an artist, writer, teacher, and anti-racist transfeminist activist. Lucía is a misfit researcher who for years has been implementing protocols designed to self-institute practices and spaces underpinned by a collective approach. Her methodology is undisciplined (or, as she says, subnormal), championing the bizarre, dirty, and marginal as a fertile testing ground for various relational, educational, and/or artistic devices. In this podcast we talk to Lucía Egaña about pedagogical processes, bibliographic dissent, wild writing, and the generative and affirmative potential of rage. We discuss identity politics, single-sex spaces, friendship as an engine for research, and the power of processes organised around informality and affects.

Cabello/Carceller is the artist duo Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller. Since the early nineties, they have been questioning the arbitrariness and restrictions imposed by gender divisions on our bodies, spaces, representations and behaviour. In this podcast Cabello/Carceller infiltrate the arts institution and show how queer voices are systematically excluded from spaces of power, as well as museums and collections. Through their work, they invite us to reconsider the spaces we live in and leave, in order to queer them and turn them into transitional, unproductive places – sometimes melancholy, sometimes liberating – from which to imagine and activate new kinds of existence. Together, we activate the political potentiality of bodies, affects, festivity and collectivity. But we also acknowledge the solitary revolt of discordant bodies who, by their mere presence, are already doing politics

A key figure in the field of live arts, Juan Domínguez describes himself as “a conceptual clown, magical cowboy, model-poet, and curator of pleasure.” His artistic body of work is situated both in and out of choreography, and champions excess as well as measure. In any case, he never loses sight of the question that guides his practice: “What shall we do together in this present moment to construct reality?” 

We talk at length with Juan Domínguez about changing the parameters of live arts, putting a frame on reality, the complexities of participation and co-authorship, and Juan’s efforts to tense time and grow older with his projects and audiences. We also talk about his (admiring) envy of TV series, about robberies, about necessary and supporting co-conspirators, about the body and politics, and about discipline and chaos.

A grain of rice sits in a field on the banks of the Mekong river. A water buffalo breaks up soil in the Ifugao terraces in the Philippines. A black box containing rice seeds is placed on a shelf inside the Svalbard seed vault at -18°C in Norway. From such a common seed, hidden in plain sight, artist-scholar Elaine Gan weaves a dynamic network of relationships connecting agroecology and more-than-human sociability, subsistence farmers and climate change, contaminated taxonomies and feminist theory.In this podcast, Elaine Gan talks about crop science, feral technologies, the global pandemic, radical difference, the art of noticing, Matsutake mushrooms, and, of course, the blahblahsphere.

Hugo Esquinca’s work is a multi-layered crust, intentionally obfuscated through excess, deliberately hard to peel. Scraping off layers of obfuscation in this dense network of transductive interactions gets you nowhere, cause those layers are precisely what Hugo uses in order to expose you (and himself) to a sort of sensory overload. We discuss with Hugo how growing up in the hyperchaos of Mexico City relates to his fascination with speed, overabundance and syncretism.